Anticlimax

The Mother of All Rallies took place in Washington DC yesterday. It was supposed to be a loud, proud, strong pro-Trump rally. It was a bust. About 500 people showed up.

Meanwhile, at the same time and also on the mall, fans of the Insane Clown Posse demonstrated. About 1500 of them showed up. They were there to defend their civil rights.

Gill and every other speaker at the Juggalo rally preached inclusivity with a passion that speakers at the pro-Trump rally reserved for subjects liker border security.

“We don’t care if you’re black, white, Hispanic, straight, gay, trans, fat as fuck or skinny as a broom stick,” Gill said, adding everyone is welcome to be or support Juggalos.

I can’t believe that today I’m sitting here admiring the righteousness of Juggalos, but I am. And it’s not just because I’m laughing at the Trumpkins.

Unburying some Secrets: Peter Godfrey-Smith’s evolution of consciousness

This is a guest post by Joshua Stein, a doctoral student at the University of Calgary and @thephilosotroll on Twitter.

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness is, like it’s subject, a strange animal. It is accessible to a broad and general audience; it also deals with a lot of technical literature in comparative psychology and philosophy of mind. I think the book can be deeply enjoyable for a broad lay-audience, but it is even better with a little bit of background and explanation of where Godfrey-Smith fits into the literature and what he’s saying about consciousness. I want to provide some of that background, to illustrate why this book is so interesting and show some colleagues in philosophy and psychology why the book should be regarded as a philosophical success.

There are some things about mind and consciousness that Godfrey-Smith takes for granted. The first is that we can study and discuss consciousness as an empirical issue. Most folks are probably familiar with the claim that “we can’t study consciousness” for some reason or other. The claim comes up an awful lot, even in some philosophical literature. (The most noteworthy advocate is the disgraced Colin McGinn.) I won’t get into the objections to this position, but it is basically set aside by most philosophers.

There are two approaches to evaluating minds; one is to look directly at the nervous system and extrapolate about how it works from the internal mechanisms, while the other is to look at how the organism behaves in the environment. There’s a long history around these two approaches, often regarded as in tension; it is increasingly common, though, to use both methods in order to a build a more satisfying theory. Godfrey-Smith uses both throughout the book: he’ll often discuss the ways he sees octopuses behave, and then shift to talking about mechanisms in the central and peripheral nervous system.

Godfrey-Smith uses the book as an opportunity to offer a rich, and technically sound, story about consciousness. There are two features that he discusses at length in the book, returning to them over and over, and these two features are pretty prominent in modern theories of consciousness. The first is that consciousness involves the integration of different sorts of sensory information (pp. 88-90); the second is that consciousness involves the temporal ordering of events (91-92), and allows those orderings to be made available in action.

Godfrey-Smith writes. “I see ‘consciousness’ as a mixed-up and over-used but useful term for forms of subjective experience that are unified and coherent in various ways.” (97) Unlike many contemporaries, Godfrey-Smith doesn’t offer a specific theory of consciousness; however, he does involve existing theories and shows how they play a role in discussing consciousness in radically different minds; obviously, in the book, he’s concerned with cephalopods.

There are some other features that show up in Godfrey-Smith’s story of consciousness that make the story so satisfying, but before I get to this, I think it is useful to note that the two prominent features play a part of an old philosophical tradition. The Anglophone philosophers David Hume and John Locke each came up with stories about what consciousness is that involved rich experience and temporal ordering, respectively.

For Hume, consciousness was about the vivid and integrated character of experience; an auditory experience isn’t a two-dimensional thing. It has pitch and timbre and tone, and there’s noise that has to be filtered out. Part of what it is to have a conscious experience of a piece of music is to experience the different dimensions of that piece, all laced together into a multidimensional sensory experience.

For Locke, consciousness was about the autobiographical constitution of identity; people are continuous over time and have a unified psychological story that extends back into their pasts, and includes certain features of possible futures. This gives us something like the temporal ordering feature.

Godfrey-Smith isn’t committal to any such view being decisive. Rather, he’s open to the possibility that both of these things are true of and involved in facilitating consciousness. His story rather illustrates that many of the inherited theories (now far more technical and closely aligned with certain findings in neuroscience and cognitive psychology) are mutually reinforcing in valuable ways.

Because Godfrey-Smith isn’t committed to a particular theory about consciousness, he’s open to pointing out how different theories illustrate different features of consciousness. One instance, present from the very beginning of the book, is the role of attention; an organism that attends to a feature of its environment for a period of time illustrates both features of consciousness (because they perceive the feature over time and integrate information about changes in that feature). He notes that this is common with octopuses who see and attend to him when he is diving to watch them; it comes up regularly in his anecdotes.

Initially, I wondered if Godfrey-Smith considered that attention is instrumental in a popular theory of consciousness (actually, the one I more-or-less subscribe to). He invokes things that look curiously like classic tasks in joint-attention (57-58), only performed by octopuses instead of children or chimpanzees; the giveaway that he’s taken this into consideration is his invocation of Jesse Prinz (91-91), whose 2012 book The Conscious Brain articulates and explores the attentional theory of consciousness.

Another feature is embodiment. While Godfrey-Smith expresses skepticism of a certain view of embodiment (74-75), he also gives a lot of the stock arguments for why embodied cognition is so important. For example, cuttlefish can’t process color visually (due to a lack of individuation in light receptors used for color vision) but still respond to differences in color in their environment through features in the skin; a version of this approach (though for object-vision and not color) has been used to develop vision substitutes for the blind. (80-81) Even as a skeptic about certain strong views of embodiment, Godfrey-Smith shows how many theories that focus on embodiment as something that shapes conscious experience get certain bits right.

I could go on with the various different features that Godfrey-Smith picks up and illustrates, but at that point I would risk summarizing a huge portion of the observations he makes in the book; it’s worth reading for yourself to see how these different elements fit together and provide a broad and interesting theory of consciousness.

The last point I want to make, which is of special interest to readers here familiar with PZ’s various criticisms of evolutionary psychology, is something that I think Godfrey-Smith does particularly well.

One way of criticizing a lot of the literature in evolutionary psychology is that it puts together a specious “just-so story” about how certain features of the brain (and therefore the mind) evolved in ways that are not as responsive to things like the environment, interaction with conspecifics, and other features that we know (from developmental psychology) play a huge role in how any particular member of a species develops.

Claims about the evolutionary history of a particular behavior, for example, and selection pressures influence the development of tools and their prospective role in reproductive success (just google “sexy handaxe theory” if you’re wondering what I’m talking about) are difficult to evaluate, for both philosophical and scientific reasons, but Godfrey-Smith’s constant focus on the contemporary role of the various functions for octopuses (for example, the way that attention helps them to interact with their environment, or the way that peculiarities in the peripheral nervous system help in hunting) makes the story much more plausible, and much easier to evaluate, rather than focusing on the buried secrets.

Dunning-Krueger and evolutionary biology fandom

A graphic designer, Katherine Young, redesigned a girls’ magazine cover to highlight the implicit assumptions we all tend to make about women:

I ran across this on Facebook, where someone posted it approvingly, and I agree — why shouldn’t girls and boys be reinforced for a wide range of abilities? You can be pretty, or you can be smart, or you can be strong, or you can be brave, or you can be sensitive…or you can be all of those things at once, even, although then I’ll hate you for being so much better than me. No! That’s not it! We should give everyone opportunities to be all those things, and others as well, and avoid channeling them down a single acceptable path.

But then someone commented on that post, and it was fascinating. I’m used to criticizing creationist for appallingly bad reasoning abilities and misuse of scientific theories, but here’s a magnificent example of someone babbling pretentiously in favor of some narrow scientific concepts, and applying them as a justification for his gender biases. It’s kind of horrifying. It’s also painfully common.

So this person (all names removed to protect the guilty) asks for a clarification. He doesn’t get one, but that doesn’t matter, he’s on a roll.

it seems to me that you are suggesting that is immoral or at least somehow improper for females to be evaluated using physical characteristics that highlight fertility such as facial symmetry, skin texture, hip to waist ratio, etc. and that instead they should be judged on mental abilities that enable them to have a career. is my understanding of your intent correct?

The implication being that the females should be judged on the basis of their potential fertility, where fertility is the most desired quality, but things like intelligence make no significant contribution to their maternal abilities.

I wonder if he’d make the same demands on boys: we should be evaluating them on symmetry, penis length, sperm count, and combat ability, because those contribute to men’s purpose in life, which is to crush their competitors and impregnate females. I didn’t ask, because I was afraid that he’d say yes, and also think those are good things.

Because of course what he claims to be driving his ideas is an objective position on evolution.

given the great demands placed on the female body during homo sapiens’ lengthy gestation and lactation period, would it be wrong for me to suggest that encouraging males to select mates based on characteristics that enable the female to generate wealth independent of a mate rather than on their ability to bear children may have long term negative effects on the species. or is that just the crazy in me talking?

Oh, man. A couple of problems here: evolution doesn’t care what’s “good” for the species. It’s all about short term responses for individuals and their progeny, and different strategies work for different individuals. One size fits all is not a smart plan for a diverse population.

Humans have complex lives and a difficult maturation process. It also wouldn’t benefit us if females were reduced to a shapely, symmetrical uterus perched atop some wide, sexually attractive hips. Maybe benevolent evolution should be shaping men to be uxorious and devoted stay-at-home fathers so their mates can focus on that beauty thing, for the good of the species?

I should also point out that this idea that we men, from our limited perspective, can actually assess what traits are “good for the species” has an unpleasant history. That’s the basis of eugenics, the idea that we can control the complex genetic interactions involved in our development, physiology, and behavior, and that we can predict what traits will be directly beneficial for future generations. We can’t. That we can’t doesn’t stop people from over-simplifying the problem and pretending that they know exactly what’s best for everyone else.

It’s pointed out to him that he’s making the fallacy of composition. Does he care? Of course not! Because evolution. And because he cares about these girls <shudder>.

that may be true but i would caution throwing the baby out with the bath water and ignoring the evolutionary reasons behind our obsession with beauty, not just because of the long term impact on the species as a whole, but also because of the individual impact on the mental well being of young girls

Again with the “species as a whole” argument! How does he know what’s good for the species as a whole? For example, right now we’re seeing a long term pattern of decline in sperm counts in many human populations. Would he favor artificial selection for fecundity in boys for the “good of the species”?

He also seems to think he knows best what is good for the mental well being of young girls, and that is to focus on beauty and appearance and fashion. Some girls will be happy with that, and of course they can follow that course…but others are not. What are we to do with them, for the good of their mental health? Tell them to shape up and memorize cosmetics brands, so they’ll be happy and well-adjusted? I never faced that specific pressure, but I was told as a kid by my peers and teachers that I, as a boy, was supposed to like sports, and should turn out for baseball and football. I was judged because I wasn’t good at sports (maybe some of you experienced the same phenomenon), and it wasn’t good for my emotional well-being. I liked to read books instead. All I needed in my life was some jerk trying to explain to me that my interests in science were not good for the species, and that they had an evolutionary justification for why I needed to butt heads with the big boys on a grassy field.

But now we get into the religious argument. This is an example of uninformed religious dogmatism.

it seems to me that you always turn the natural order of things upside down! sometimes i am not sure if you are serious or just playing with me :)

not everyone can be smart and win the google science fair. suggesting to young girls that they have to be smart in order to have a meaningful and successful life might not be the best way to go.

natural order of things is a dead give-away. How do you know? Why is it that the natural order of things is always a matter of a guy informing girls that they are supposed to make themselves attractive to him?

And that last line…has he considered that suggesting to young girls that they have to be pretty in order to have a meaningful and successful life might not be the best way to go? Probably not.

One last quote…

when i was young and naive, the vanity of women frustrated me. especially because i was a slob, i could not understand their obssession with adorning themselves with all kinds of paints and bows and ribbons and shiny trinkets, but now that the passions of youth that blind objective contemplation have been reduced a few dimly glowing embers buried in a pile of ashes, i understand there are evolutionary forces behind these obssessions and i can accept them as the natural order of things.

The hypocrisy…he was a slob, but he knows best what women should do. He thinks women as a whole are vain. But now that he has found Jesus evolution, he understands the reason why women should be working so hard to make themselves beautiful — it’s to enhance his ability to reproduce, and theirs, too, because the only way a woman can improve their fitness is with a good hip-to-waist ratio, while he can get away with being a pompous slob.

I am not fooled at all. This is a man using poorly understood sciencey buzzwords to justify his culturally supported biases.

Why I am a biologist rather than a physicist

I’ve never written my name in the snow. I’ve never participated in a competition to see how far I can urinate. These are apparently serious deficits in my experiences that affected my ability to visualize three-dimensional trajectories, according to some sad academics.

But the academics argued that ‘playful urination practices – from seeing how high you can pee to games such as Peeball (where men compete using their urine to destroy a ball placed in a urinal) – may give boys an advantage over girls when it comes to physics’.

Oh, no! I never even heard of “Peeball” before! But according to these wankers, it’s an important life lesson in physics.

This self-directed, hands-on, intrinsically (and sometimes extrinsically, and socially) rewarding activity must have a huge potential contribution to learning, resulting in a deep, embodied, material knowledge of projectile motion that’s simply not accessible to girls.

Where did this nonsense come from? It was published in the Daily Mail, so I felt a momentary relief — that rag is all garbage, so it’s not surprising that they gave it some credit. But where did they get it? The Times Educational Supplement. Christ.

The authors argue that there is a serious problem here. I agree.

The gender gap in physics, and other related subjects including engineering, has long been a cause for concern. This has led to both educational innovations as well as policy interventions such as Change The Equation, Sage and Wise. However, there is little evidence that such campaigns have much effect. For example, Wise was set up in the UK in 1984. In that time, the fraction of female students studying physics in the final two years of school has hovered around 20 per cent.

Therefore we have to ask: why don’t young women perform as well in physics?

Then they acknowledge that there are a whole lot of social forces biasing women’s opportunities and choices. Also true.

Of course, there are likely to be a number of complex, interacting reasons, some of which can be changed more easily than others. The majority of physicists are male, and this reinforces a masculine culture. Historically, logical and mathematical ways of thinking have long been associated with masculinity (although all three of us would argue that such modes of thinking are not particularly masculine or feminine). Most physics teachers are male, so there aren’t many female role models for physics students.

There may also be cultural effects outside the discipline – parents may offer boys more encouragement to study physics as it leads to later study of, for example, engineering (another field that struggles to recruit and retain women).

Knowing all that, they then hare off after this wacky idea that boys learn physics by peeing up to five times a day, so by 14, boys have had the opportunity to play with projectile motion around 10,000 times. Good god. They haven’t done any serious analysis; they watched some youtube videos of people peeing in the snow, they heard a few anecdotes about pissing contests. They did no experiments. They did not propose any tests of their hypothesis. They don’t even suggest possible controls. They make a few jokes about peeing. And they get that published.

There are probably a few people who will take this bullshit seriously, because we know one thing for sure: there are guys who will seize upon any biological basis for their supposed superiority.

What our students are learning

Atrios describes it perfectly.

Some Powerless College Students Are The Greatest Threat To Free Speech The World Has Ever Known

Anyone who has spent a bit of time around especially elite college campuses knows that while, yes, sometimes students protest right wing speakers – sometimes this is perfectly right and good and sometimes you can argue that they go too far and the heckler’s veto is rarely if ever appropriate but these things are always a bit more complicated than people make them out to be – it’s pressure from the top that tends to discourage left wing speakers from coming to campus. There are academics and activists on the campus circuit who every knows are “controversial,” quite often because of rather strong left wing views on things like war, carceral state, economics, racial issues, etc. Black “radicals,” commies, Palestinian activists, etc. Watch those pots of money mysteriously disappear if you try to put your hands in them to fund a visit by one of these speakers. To put it simply, it’s not controversial at all to advocate invading a country for lies, and then profiting handsomely off of that, but it is controversial to suggest that maybe, just maybe, when police are executing people in your communities that something more than accepting it quietly is necessary. Military and cops are good, the poor and the marginalized are suspect. And these are our liberal institutions!

Anyway, the administration and money have the power and more importantly the need to cater to power. The kids have protest. People get very upset about the kids. It’s always revealing.

We see it all the time. Armed Nazis chant racist slogans and threaten millions with death and deportation, and kill people; the police are on their side. Young people with a better sense of morality than our national leaders protest because they must, and the New York Times and other organs of the status quo get the vapors about antifa. It plays out like that over and over again. The only criticism I have of that summary is that it isn’t just the elite colleges — it goes on at state and community colleges, too.

But it is true that the richer the university, the more conservative its administration. Look at Harvard; it’s prestigious, that is so, but it’s also run by people who have been promoted for their zealotry in defending the endowment and propping up the richest people in the country. See the ethical blindness they proudly exhibit in the dismissal of Chelsea Manning:

A member of Manning’s support team challenged Elmendorf to explain why Harvard was so anxious about giving her the title of “visiting fellow” when in the same roster of this year’s fellows they had included Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary, and Trump’s former presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was charged with assaulting a reporter during the 2016 race.

They noted what they suggested was the absurdity of honouring two prominent members of a presidential campaign notorious for its bending of the truth and controversial stances on race issues in America.

Elmendorf further alienated the Manning team by responding that Spicer and Lewandowski “brought something to the table” and could teach the Harvard audience something. That, for the recipients of the phone conversation, implied that the whistleblower by contrast had nothing to contribute.

That she was regarded as less useful to educating the Harvard audience than two corrupt frauds is not surprising; what was surprising is that she got an invitation in the first place. The corrupt frauds represent Harvard values better than someone who exposed corruption in the execution of the war in Afghanistan. The crime isn’t murdering civilians, in Harvard’s eyes, it’s revealing those murders to the world.

OMG! More deplatforming!

Online critics complained about the lineup at a conference. They couldn’t believe who had been taken seriously and invited to give a talk. And they managed to get the organizers to disinvite someone. Fie, you shout. For shame! What about open discussion and debate about the ideas? Unbelievable. How could they defile the principles of free speech and freedom of thought to reject Rock Star and Indiana Jones of the superfood universe?

That’s right. They disinvited David Avocado Wolfe.

Following an online backlash for hosting alternative health guru David “Avocado” Wolfe as a speaker at the annual Biohacker Summit in October, held this year in Finland, organisers announced that Wolfe has been removed from the conference lineup.

What a crime. But is it possible that some people are so unqualified, so repugnant, so wrong that they don’t deserve a speaking slot at a conference? Say it ain’t so. I was going to suggest Ken Ham as the keynote speaker of the Society for the Study of Evolution meetings next year.

What about Free Speeeeeeeeach-eeach-eeach-eeach?

A wee happy omen of radicalization in the correct direction, for a change

People are always complaining about those danged liberal universities, especially places like mine where we even have “liberal” in the category label. But I always wonder where they get these ideas, because in general students are here to learn, rather than push an agenda, and we keep them busy with things like math. The only exception is, that if you’d been here last year, you would have noticed our bulletin boards were flooded with student-selected Libertarian crapola…”Taxation is Theft” posters, and paeans to capitalism generously provided by right-wing think tanks. It was weird, because it wasn’t at all representative of overall campus sentiment, but was what our tiny minority of raving right-wingers were promoting (see also the Morris North Star, which seems to be happily defunct now).

This year, though, it’s a little different. I was brought up short when I passed a bulletin board and saw this posted:

Awww. The little leftist ragamuffins are getting emboldened. This makes me so happy.

It comes from an organization called crimethinc.

CrimethInc. is a rebel alliance—a decentralized network pledged to anonymous collective action—a breakout from the prisons of our age. We strive to reinvent our lives and our world according to the principles of self-determination and mutual aid.

We believe that you should be free to dispose of your limitless potential on your own terms: that no government, market, or ideology should be able to dictate what your life can be. If you agree, let’s do something about it.

Honestly, most of the noise on campuses gets made by the radical right — see also recent events at Berkeley — so it warms my heart to see that some of our students are finally waking up and making a few quiet protests. Bravo!